Top Three Things That Make People Exit Your Site

It is very difficult to get people into your site, but it is much more difficult to keep them there. How do you actually make people stay in your site to lower your bounce rates and keep them reading your pages? It is important to understand what drives people to close their browsers.

Here are the top three things that make people head for the exits when viewing a website.

1. Advertisements.

Ads are what fuels most websites. It is the advertisements that pay the bills, so to speak. But if you have a page that is mostly made up of ads, or if you have ads that are intrusive, then your users would probably not like you for it.

Pop-ups, pop-under, or even ads that take up a very large part of your page can turn off your visitors.

Be sure to move your ads out of the way and that they are placed at strategic points of your page. Avoid using pop-ups and even moving graphics.

2. Designing your page so that sections look like ads.

Like it or not, people will avoid your page if it looks like it’s filled with ads, even if you do have legitimate content. Selective attention dictates that most site visitors ignore ads, so anything that looks like an ad gets ignored.

For example, using a square graphic that looks like banner ads for your navigation will result in banner blindness. Or perhaps, putting up flashing text will be less effective because people have already learned not to pay attention to aggressive animation.

If you also like using pop-ups to keep your visitors on your main page, then you should know that most people tend to close pop-ups even before it has finished loading!

3. Hiding the information your users need.

Nobody goes into a website just for the heck of it. People visit your site for a very particular goal: get information, get entertained or buy your stuff.

This can happen in two ways. One is to “trick” users into coming into your site for certain keywords, and then they find out that the page itself does not offer them anything of value.

Or it could be insufficient information. For example, there are sites that sell products but do not list their prices.